| SUPPLY&DEMAND Lobby Directors |
Tony Kaye |
|
Pulling Power
Shots 108
by
A lusciously buxom, bikini-clad female sprints through a forest. She is joined by a tribe of Amazonian lovelies, all of them barefoot and half naked. They race to a beach, where there are hundreds of other girls swimming like fury through the waves, all drawn inexorably towards a bloke who is standing on the sand, covering himself liberally with bodyspray.
You guessed it, it’s a Lynx ad - the one called Billions, shot by Fredrik Bond in 2006. It could only be a Lynx ad, of course, with that magical formula of geeky-guy-pulling-a-bunch-of-improbably-hot-women-by-dint-of-his-fragrant-male-grooming-product. In short, Lynx, or Axe as it is known outside the UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, gets you the girl.
This wonderfully simple strategy has delighted spotty teenagers, Unilever accountants and red-blooded males for 13 years, ever since it was dreamt up by Bartle Bogle Hegarty London. The agency has nurtured the brand and created ever new, refreshing twists on the central premise worldwide since 1995, steering it towards sustained dominance in its sector everywhere. The brand has also notched up some impressive statistics, such as being more popular than Coke, having more target 15-to-24-year-old males buy it than a pair of trainers, and having more consumers using the product than surfing the internet. Lynx is, basically a brand phenomenon.
Rosie Arnold, a creative director at BBH London, who has worked on the account for 11 years, recalls the early days.
“The first ad was House Party. Before us, the brand had always taken itself a bit seriously, using a sort of James Bond pastiche - rugged man in Vietnamese country drops bag and Lynx rolls out like a grenade, sort of thing. It was very macho. But when we won the account, we did a jokey script about an unconfident man who tries to impress a girl but fluffs it. It was charming and funny and took the brand in a different direction.”
That first ad was not the stuff that awards were made of, Arnold concedes, but it sowed the seed for The Lynx Effect, the core idea that has carried the brand ever since. The next significant turning point was the Dream Date spot, in 1997, starring Jennifer Aniston.
“At the time everyone at the agency wanted to work on Levi’s, but after Dream Date, they all wanted to work on Lynx,” recalls Arnold.
BBH handles the Lynx business worldwide, out of its offices in New York, Singapore, Tokyo and London, but it also partially shares global responsibility for the brand with Argentinian shop Vegaolmosponce, part of the Lowe network. Other agencies are occasionally brought in too.
International sales were only moving at a relatively sluggish rate of 6 per cent, per year, from 1996 to mid 2002, but the global adoption that year of The Lynx Effect, BBH’s core strategy, has helped the brand grow 20 per cent every year ever since. It has also powered the launch from scratch in the US, where the product has grown from a $0 to $500 million brand in just five years. Kevin Roddy, executive creative director BBH New York, comments: “Axe is a great client. They’re great because we’re ‘partners’. We work together as a team, not as a client and vendor. Creatively, we challenge and push each other. We insist on creative innovation from everyone on the team.” The agency imported the core idea from the UK and only makes minor adjustments to suit its US audience.
“’The Axe Effect’ is an idea we inherited from BBH London, and happily so,” explains Roddy. “It remains creatively fertile and incredibly relevant at the same time. There are elements of the idea that we occasionally tailor for this market but, in general, the idea travels well.”
Everyone who works or has worked on the account has a theory about why it has been so successful. Apart from the use of scantily-clad females, that is. “This is a brand that we have intentionally treated as a part of young guys’ lives,” says Roddy. “Together, we have made it a tool for guys in the mating game. And that’s a unique, distinctive, and incredibly valuable place for any brand to inhabit. But to do that, we have had to use our marketing to lead our audience. We take them to new and interesting places. That’s where, I believe, our success comes from.”
Arnold adds: “Boy gets girl has always been a strategy for fragrances, so it is not new. But with Lynx it is the way it is done; with irony, wit and self-deprecation. It is done in a realistic but funny way that guys can relate to. The scripts are about blokes pulling girls, but they are done with a degree of charm.” The client - currently Karen Hamilton, vice president, marketing, Axe/Lynx Europe - has her theories too.
“Firstly, the campaign’s focus is on the mating game, which is universally interesting and engaging, and particularly relevant to young men. So it’s a good starting point for great advertising. Secondly, the brand talks to ordinary guys and does not try to set up an unattainable aspiration, but to find humorous ways to boost their confidence. Finally, the best ads in the campaign are witty and irreverent, and while they all tell a similar story, each tries to be fresh and different in its own way,” she says.
Directors who have filmed Lynx spots share, not surprisingly, fond memories of the shoots. Jose Antonio Prat filmed the popular No spot in 2005, the one by Vegaolmosponce with the girl continually saying “no” to the advances of a bloke she meets on the beach, only to be seen cooking him breakfast the following morning. It’s a perfect execution to communicate Lynx’s 24-hour capabilities. “Lynx is a dreamt client to shoot a film for,” he says. “There is something inherently humorous about seduction. The business of girls being picked-up makes me laugh. So it’s a great state of mind to work in.”
The No script appealed to the director because of “the audacity of the premise and the simplicity of the idea”. “It’s a storyteller’s dream,” he says. But Prat also recalls one particular memory about the shoot.
“I remember the actress chatting away with the crew in between takes as we waited for turnaround. She was saying how her boyfriend was this skinny, short, much older guy. I thought, wow, he must be spraying himself with Lynx, and the stuff really works. But a year or so later I spotted her in the tabloids. She was dating Bruce Willis.”
Ringan Ledwidge also enjoyed his Lynx shoot. He filmed BBH London’s charming Getting Depressed spot in 2004, in which a naked young couple systematically pick up the clothes they have left in a trail all the way back to where they first exchanged flirty looks at the supermarket.
“The client was fantastic and really supported and understood what Nick Gill, the creative, and I were trying to do,” recalls Ledwidge. “Traditionally Lynx ads are about beautiful girls and humour, but we were trying to do something a bit different. At the time the whole lad culture thing was dying out and we needed to do something that was still sexy but somehow smarter, with a more contemporary feel.”
Ledwidge doesn’t recall any pressure from working on a campaign with such heritage and popularity, other than the desire not to “fuck up a great script”. But he does remember “the kids’ faces in the area that the commercial begins, on seeing a lovely girl walking down the street in her underwear”.
While the campaign in total has been wildly successful, individual ads have had their own independent success. The Click film of 2006, starring Ben Affleck, triggered an international craze, with blokes feverishly trying to get hold of the clickers featured in the spot. At one point these were trading for £25 pounds each on eBay. In Europe alone, over 4 million clickers were distributed, of which 3 million had been specifically requested via web or text. The film and subsequent phenomenon also generated £1m of free PR across Europe. And the Pulse spot of 2003, in which a particularly dorky guy dances in a bar flanked by two sexy girls, triggered a dance craze. The steps went with a specific track, Make Luv by Room 5, which had been seeded in clubs and released to DJs before being officially released across Europe in March 2003. The track hit the number one slot in the UK charts for four weeks. Sales of Pulse also raced up 35 per cent on the previous fragrance the year before.
The work for campaigns on Lynx is also known for developing with the times, moving effortlessly into the digital realm. In the recent Get In There campaign, for instance, BBH addressed the inherent problem of how a sensory male grooming brand can have an impact in the digital world (where guys are ‘meeting’ girls online, in chatrooms and via webcams) by telling them to get out and have a go with girls in the real world – not just in cyberspace. Hamilton explains: Get In There is not simply a Lynx website; Lynx goes to where our guys go, such as [social networking site] bebo. We are offering gadgets and tools to help in the mating game, for example mobile phone tools and videos which show you how to use these tools.”
Another understandably popular Lynx website scored a hit with its depiction of a dancing girl whose dress would fly away if the viewer blew into his desktop microphone.
Similar break-through success stories have been chalked up in the US too. An idea called Gamekillers was conceived as a TV show from the outset, and a series was commissioned by MTV. It featured regular blokes being thwarted in their attempts to seduce women by a variety of Gamekiller characters, from The Conquistador, who was particularly skilled in the language of love, to British Accent Guy, who used his phony accent to get the girl.
Roddy recalls: “When the Gamekillers TV show first aired on MTV, the entire Axe team rented out a movie theatre and had a group viewing. Everyone who touched the project was invited to share in the glory of watching it air. It was fantastic.”
In 2005 Lynx hit the TV screens of Australia, to the delight of a gleefully receptive audience. The Lowe Hunt campaign featured a fictional Lynx airline where the hostesses dress in foxy lemon miniskirts and ‘attend’ to their passengers’ every need, including staging girl-on-girl spanking sessions and pillow fights and cuddling up to them to keep them warm.
But was this just yet another fun campaign, showing off the ad team’s skill and wit, or could it also boast results and effectiveness? The results are clear, as for most other Lynx campaigns. The Lynx Jet product sold out in Woolworths, Australia’s biggest retailer, in three weeks, and 264,883 unique visitors were registered to the Lynx Jet website in the same time frame. So who knows where future campaigns will take us? Whatever happens, you can’t imagine Lynx and its distinctive advertising campaigns easily abandoning its global army of keen followers. That age-old business of boy wanting to impress girl can only last and last.
Shots 108
by
A lusciously buxom, bikini-clad female sprints through a forest. She is joined by a tribe of Amazonian lovelies, all of them barefoot and half naked. They race to a beach, where there are hundreds of other girls swimming like fury through the waves, all drawn inexorably towards a bloke who is standing on the sand, covering himself liberally with bodyspray.
You guessed it, it’s a Lynx ad - the one called Billions, shot by Fredrik Bond in 2006. It could only be a Lynx ad, of course, with that magical formula of geeky-guy-pulling-a-bunch-of-improbably-hot-women-by-dint-of-his-fragrant-male-grooming-product. In short, Lynx, or Axe as it is known outside the UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, gets you the girl.
This wonderfully simple strategy has delighted spotty teenagers, Unilever accountants and red-blooded males for 13 years, ever since it was dreamt up by Bartle Bogle Hegarty London. The agency has nurtured the brand and created ever new, refreshing twists on the central premise worldwide since 1995, steering it towards sustained dominance in its sector everywhere. The brand has also notched up some impressive statistics, such as being more popular than Coke, having more target 15-to-24-year-old males buy it than a pair of trainers, and having more consumers using the product than surfing the internet. Lynx is, basically a brand phenomenon.
Rosie Arnold, a creative director at BBH London, who has worked on the account for 11 years, recalls the early days.
“The first ad was House Party. Before us, the brand had always taken itself a bit seriously, using a sort of James Bond pastiche - rugged man in Vietnamese country drops bag and Lynx rolls out like a grenade, sort of thing. It was very macho. But when we won the account, we did a jokey script about an unconfident man who tries to impress a girl but fluffs it. It was charming and funny and took the brand in a different direction.”
That first ad was not the stuff that awards were made of, Arnold concedes, but it sowed the seed for The Lynx Effect, the core idea that has carried the brand ever since. The next significant turning point was the Dream Date spot, in 1997, starring Jennifer Aniston.
“At the time everyone at the agency wanted to work on Levi’s, but after Dream Date, they all wanted to work on Lynx,” recalls Arnold.
BBH handles the Lynx business worldwide, out of its offices in New York, Singapore, Tokyo and London, but it also partially shares global responsibility for the brand with Argentinian shop Vegaolmosponce, part of the Lowe network. Other agencies are occasionally brought in too.
International sales were only moving at a relatively sluggish rate of 6 per cent, per year, from 1996 to mid 2002, but the global adoption that year of The Lynx Effect, BBH’s core strategy, has helped the brand grow 20 per cent every year ever since. It has also powered the launch from scratch in the US, where the product has grown from a $0 to $500 million brand in just five years. Kevin Roddy, executive creative director BBH New York, comments: “Axe is a great client. They’re great because we’re ‘partners’. We work together as a team, not as a client and vendor. Creatively, we challenge and push each other. We insist on creative innovation from everyone on the team.” The agency imported the core idea from the UK and only makes minor adjustments to suit its US audience.
“’The Axe Effect’ is an idea we inherited from BBH London, and happily so,” explains Roddy. “It remains creatively fertile and incredibly relevant at the same time. There are elements of the idea that we occasionally tailor for this market but, in general, the idea travels well.”
Everyone who works or has worked on the account has a theory about why it has been so successful. Apart from the use of scantily-clad females, that is. “This is a brand that we have intentionally treated as a part of young guys’ lives,” says Roddy. “Together, we have made it a tool for guys in the mating game. And that’s a unique, distinctive, and incredibly valuable place for any brand to inhabit. But to do that, we have had to use our marketing to lead our audience. We take them to new and interesting places. That’s where, I believe, our success comes from.”
Arnold adds: “Boy gets girl has always been a strategy for fragrances, so it is not new. But with Lynx it is the way it is done; with irony, wit and self-deprecation. It is done in a realistic but funny way that guys can relate to. The scripts are about blokes pulling girls, but they are done with a degree of charm.” The client - currently Karen Hamilton, vice president, marketing, Axe/Lynx Europe - has her theories too.
“Firstly, the campaign’s focus is on the mating game, which is universally interesting and engaging, and particularly relevant to young men. So it’s a good starting point for great advertising. Secondly, the brand talks to ordinary guys and does not try to set up an unattainable aspiration, but to find humorous ways to boost their confidence. Finally, the best ads in the campaign are witty and irreverent, and while they all tell a similar story, each tries to be fresh and different in its own way,” she says.
Directors who have filmed Lynx spots share, not surprisingly, fond memories of the shoots. Jose Antonio Prat filmed the popular No spot in 2005, the one by Vegaolmosponce with the girl continually saying “no” to the advances of a bloke she meets on the beach, only to be seen cooking him breakfast the following morning. It’s a perfect execution to communicate Lynx’s 24-hour capabilities. “Lynx is a dreamt client to shoot a film for,” he says. “There is something inherently humorous about seduction. The business of girls being picked-up makes me laugh. So it’s a great state of mind to work in.”
The No script appealed to the director because of “the audacity of the premise and the simplicity of the idea”. “It’s a storyteller’s dream,” he says. But Prat also recalls one particular memory about the shoot.
“I remember the actress chatting away with the crew in between takes as we waited for turnaround. She was saying how her boyfriend was this skinny, short, much older guy. I thought, wow, he must be spraying himself with Lynx, and the stuff really works. But a year or so later I spotted her in the tabloids. She was dating Bruce Willis.”
Ringan Ledwidge also enjoyed his Lynx shoot. He filmed BBH London’s charming Getting Depressed spot in 2004, in which a naked young couple systematically pick up the clothes they have left in a trail all the way back to where they first exchanged flirty looks at the supermarket.
“The client was fantastic and really supported and understood what Nick Gill, the creative, and I were trying to do,” recalls Ledwidge. “Traditionally Lynx ads are about beautiful girls and humour, but we were trying to do something a bit different. At the time the whole lad culture thing was dying out and we needed to do something that was still sexy but somehow smarter, with a more contemporary feel.”
Ledwidge doesn’t recall any pressure from working on a campaign with such heritage and popularity, other than the desire not to “fuck up a great script”. But he does remember “the kids’ faces in the area that the commercial begins, on seeing a lovely girl walking down the street in her underwear”.
While the campaign in total has been wildly successful, individual ads have had their own independent success. The Click film of 2006, starring Ben Affleck, triggered an international craze, with blokes feverishly trying to get hold of the clickers featured in the spot. At one point these were trading for £25 pounds each on eBay. In Europe alone, over 4 million clickers were distributed, of which 3 million had been specifically requested via web or text. The film and subsequent phenomenon also generated £1m of free PR across Europe. And the Pulse spot of 2003, in which a particularly dorky guy dances in a bar flanked by two sexy girls, triggered a dance craze. The steps went with a specific track, Make Luv by Room 5, which had been seeded in clubs and released to DJs before being officially released across Europe in March 2003. The track hit the number one slot in the UK charts for four weeks. Sales of Pulse also raced up 35 per cent on the previous fragrance the year before.
The work for campaigns on Lynx is also known for developing with the times, moving effortlessly into the digital realm. In the recent Get In There campaign, for instance, BBH addressed the inherent problem of how a sensory male grooming brand can have an impact in the digital world (where guys are ‘meeting’ girls online, in chatrooms and via webcams) by telling them to get out and have a go with girls in the real world – not just in cyberspace. Hamilton explains: Get In There is not simply a Lynx website; Lynx goes to where our guys go, such as [social networking site] bebo. We are offering gadgets and tools to help in the mating game, for example mobile phone tools and videos which show you how to use these tools.”
Another understandably popular Lynx website scored a hit with its depiction of a dancing girl whose dress would fly away if the viewer blew into his desktop microphone.
Similar break-through success stories have been chalked up in the US too. An idea called Gamekillers was conceived as a TV show from the outset, and a series was commissioned by MTV. It featured regular blokes being thwarted in their attempts to seduce women by a variety of Gamekiller characters, from The Conquistador, who was particularly skilled in the language of love, to British Accent Guy, who used his phony accent to get the girl.
Roddy recalls: “When the Gamekillers TV show first aired on MTV, the entire Axe team rented out a movie theatre and had a group viewing. Everyone who touched the project was invited to share in the glory of watching it air. It was fantastic.”
In 2005 Lynx hit the TV screens of Australia, to the delight of a gleefully receptive audience. The Lowe Hunt campaign featured a fictional Lynx airline where the hostesses dress in foxy lemon miniskirts and ‘attend’ to their passengers’ every need, including staging girl-on-girl spanking sessions and pillow fights and cuddling up to them to keep them warm.
But was this just yet another fun campaign, showing off the ad team’s skill and wit, or could it also boast results and effectiveness? The results are clear, as for most other Lynx campaigns. The Lynx Jet product sold out in Woolworths, Australia’s biggest retailer, in three weeks, and 264,883 unique visitors were registered to the Lynx Jet website in the same time frame. So who knows where future campaigns will take us? Whatever happens, you can’t imagine Lynx and its distinctive advertising campaigns easily abandoning its global army of keen followers. That age-old business of boy wanting to impress girl can only last and last.